Horrendous: War Is Still... 12"

Debut 12" from this new Swedish hardcore band featuring members of Infernoh. As you can probably tell from the cover, this is total Discharge worship, and when I am confronted with such a record I generally ask myself two questions: 1. does it rage? and 2. what are the distinguishing characteristics (however small) that makes this different from every other record in the style, or indeed from Discharge themselves? Well, to answer the first question, this rages. Hard. I'd say probably even harder than Infernoh themselves. The answer to the second question is necessarily a bit more complicated. The production here is 100% spot-on... heavy, thick, and pounding while still maintaining an edge of rawness. In that respect, it's right up there with the greats of the style, i.e. records like Discharge's own Why? and Disaster's War Cry. Beyond that, this isn't too out of the box. There are some bass fills here and there that are a little more rocknroll-y than I would expect, but pretty much everything else about this is spot-on Why? worship. If you're the type who thinks it's silly to have a bunch of records in your collection that sound essentially the same then you probably won't see what all the fuss is about, but if you're a true d-beat warrior this is 100% essential... I think it totally crushes Kromosom, Infernoh, Koward, and most other modern d-beat bands.